Con.Cel: Tracking the online contagion of Incel and male supremacist ideology
Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST)
Profile

Dr Lewys Brace
Senior Lecturer in Computational Social Science (Criminology)
6963
01392 726963
Lewys Brace is a Senior Lecturer in Computational Social Science and and Co-Director of the University of Exeter's Q-Step Centre, where he specialises in data science, extremism, terrorism, cybercrime, and Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT).
His research currently focuses on online extremist radicalisation and the development of computational research methods for the social sciences. This has involved exploring the online behaviours of the far-right through the MineChans and ExID projects and more recently the incels trough the Con.Cel project. His work has appeared in journals such as Terrorism and Political Violence, Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, and Perspectives on Terrorism.
He is a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (https://www.turing.ac.uk/) and the lead for the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence's Security and Policing theme (https://www.exeter.ac.uk/idsai/researchthemes/).
He can be found on Twitter with the handle @Lew_Brace.
Research group links
Research interests
- Extremism
- Terrorism
- Online radicalisation
- Cybercrime/terrorism/warfare
- Quantitative research methods
- Social Data Science
- Numerical and Computational research methods
- Artifical Intelligeence/machine learning
- Natural Language Processing
- Open-Source Intelligence
Research Groups Links:
-Exeter Q-Step Centre
Modules taught
- POL3295 - Security, Society, and Algorithms
- SOC2112 - Introduction to Terrorism Studies
- SOC2120 - Introduction to Open-source Intelligence (OSINT)
- SOC2121 - Cybercrime
- SOC3112 - Introduction to Terrorism Studies
- SOC3128 - Introduction to Open-source Intelligence (OSINT)
- SOC3129 - Cybercrime
- SOC3144 - Security, Society, and Algorithms
- SSI1002 - Programming for the Social Sciences
Biography
Qualifications
- PhD in Complex Systems Simulation - Computational Research Methods, University of Southampton, UK.
- MSc Social and Cultural Research Methods, Brunel University, UK.
- BSc (Hons) Police Studies, Buckinghamshire New University, UK.